Business 
No Comments 
I just released a cool website that automatically generates a Facebook Timeline Cover Photo collage based on photos of your family and friends. Check it out!
Business No Comments 
Sometimes Klout creates profiles for Twitter accounts that it has discovered. It’s possible that you’ll find that Klout has created a profile for a Twitter account that you own, possibly one of your websites. After claiming your Klout account here are the important steps to follow to clean up your account.
Using the top-right navigation menu (where your profile name/picture is) to go to Settings. Verify that your Brand Name is as you want it to be. Check to be sure the correct profile picture is being used. And make sure the correct profile text is being used. Klout will use the profile text from Twitter, or you can enter your own text.
Add your other social networks. Be sure to connect to your Facebook fan page and any other profiles that you have for this account/websites. Normally the profile page is asking you to do this when you first sign in. If not, you can do this under Account > Settings > Connected Networks.
Under Topics, remove any unrelated topics from your account. My FidoFinder.com account had topics of about 10 different cities. Although it was nice that I had already received +K’s, I actually want to be an influencer of other topics than people’s favorite cities.
Now add your targeted Topics. This is where you decide what you want to be know for. For Fido Finder I chose Dogs and Shelters and Rescues.
Under Influencers remove any of the your Influencers that you don’t feel are valid. For me this meant removing every single one that was auto-generated by Klout. I had no idea who these people were.
Add your personal account as an Infuencer.
Give your personal account at least one +K for one of your Topics. If you do not have valid topics set up on your personal account, save your +K’s for when you do.
Business No Comments 
I just signed up for Klout and was poking around on my personal profile. I noticed that some of my websites already had Klout profiles that I had not created. At first I thought that fans had taken it upon themselves to create accounts for the websites, but after reading the FAQ I found that Klout will create accounts, at will, from existing Twitter accounts that it discovers. I don’t know if there are any criteria for this, but it’s clearly stated that they do this. So I realized that this is most likely what happened. The question I had was, “How do I now claim this Klout account as mine?” since I own the websites. The FAQ does not cover this topic at all. So here is what I discovered.
To claim a Kout account that was automatically created for a Twitter account that you own:
Business, Development No Comments 
This is a review of the SEO monitoring service SEO Moz Pro.
If you have no idea what SEO is read my SEO Primer article. Every website owner needs to understand what SEO is and how it’s affecting your position in the search engine and your free traffic. SEO Moz Pro simply helps you to monitor your SEO performance, and the performance of your competitors. It’s not necessarily an SEO consultant, but it does help you identify areas of improvement and help you to monitor how your SEO work is affecting both SERP position and natural search traffic.
SEO Moz Pro is made up of a bunch of reports, much like Google Analytics (GA) is. SEO Moz Pro has 6 useful tools for anyone doing SEO. These tools are Traffic Data, Crawl Diagnostics, Keyword Rankings, Competitive Domain Analysis, On-Page Optimization, and Social.
The Traffic Data report monitors performance and changes of your natural search result traffic. SEO Moz Pro can sync with your GA account in order to provide you with reports specific to SEO. You can view your organic search visit data, much like you would in GA, but you can also view “branded search traffic.” For example, let’s say we’re monitoring MemberMob.com (crowdsourced marketing) and we see that we have an increase in natural search visitors for the previous week. We can look further and see how much of this traffic is from branded searches, “MemberMob”, versus keyword searches, like “Crowdsourced Marketing.” This report shows you a graph of natural search keywords delivering traffic and also provides a data table of these keywords, much like in GA.
The Crawl Diagnostics report provides you with essential information on any errors found while crawling your website. This report is much like the Google Webmaster reports but with a different viewpoint. This report is broken into Errors, Warnings, and Notices. Notices are things like 301 redirects and things that you might just want to be aware of, but aren’t necessarily “bad.” Warnings are things like Long URL, Overly-Dynamic URL, Missing Meta Tags, etc. Errors are problems like Duplicate Page Content, Missing Title Elements, and Server Errors. This report, although necessary to revisit over time, is mostly useful the first time SEO Moz crawls your website. One you’ve decided if the Errors, Warnings, and Notices are something that need to be fixed or ignored there is little value in this report on a week-to-week basis. Obviously if you have major changes to your website on a weekly or monthly basis the value of this tool increases.
The Keyword Rankings report is a pretty standard SEO report that shows your SERP position for each of your keywords across whichever search engines you wish you monitor (Google and Bing, duh). The report shows your position as well as the delta since the last search. A nice feature of this report is that it also shows your search traffic visits and delta next to each keyword. This way you can relate any traffic increases or decreases to your keyword position changes. In the past I would simply check my keywords in Google via search link bookmarks I had saved, but this is proving to be less reliable over time. With Google getting more “local” and with the introduction of tools like Google+ each user’s SERPs are less and less like their neighbors. The Keyword Rankings reports gives you a report that is not geo-localized and not affected by any outside factors.
The Competitive Domain Analysis report is probably the most informative report in SEO Moz as it shows exactly how to rank against your competitors. Of course the data is only as good as what variables you provide it. If you do not have any clear competitors this report becomes less informative. Through this report you can see both an overall ranking of your domain, SEO-wise, versus your competitors as well as the individual characteristics that make up the domain ranking, or “domain authority.” This report tracks many factors some of which are External Followed Links, Total External Links, No Follow vs Follow Link Ratio, etc. This can give you an idea of why you might be performing better or worse than your competitors in the SERPs. Having the highest number of total links but the lowest number of “followed” links might lead you to realize that your competitors are better at getting high-valued links than you are.
The On-Page Optimization report is where you can find some actual action items for improving your SEO. This report shows where you’ve “made the grade” on implementing your on-page SEO and where you’ve failed, based on the keywords that you’ve included for your campaign. You not only get a grade for each keyword, you also can see each characteristic that makes up the grade. Even better, SEO Moz will tell you what it takes to “fix” any item that didn’t go towards a grade of “A.”
The Social report provides you with information on your Twitter and Facebook interactions. You can stay updated on your follower/fan increases and decreases, traffic from your social profiles, and even your Facebook shares and Twitter retweets.
At the time of this blog post the price of the SEO Moz Pro subscription is $99/month. I know for my business this price is worth every penny to be on top of my SEO efforts. I might not find something every month to improve on but I definitely have to be on top of my website SEO work to make sure I’m staying ahead of my competitors.
Business No Comments I’ve created a business name generator. The site creates random business names that can be used for Web 2.0-type business names. The generator is for creating a name when all of the good names are already taken.
Business No Comments I’ve come across some pretty ridiculous statements about the negative effects of crowdsourcing contests. There are complete websites dedicated to convincing people that crowdsourcing contests are “bad.” Most of the arguments are aimed specifically at graphic design crowdsourcing contests. I do not actually own any websites in the crowdsourced graphic design space, but I have some strong thoughts on the arguments against crowdsourcing contests, in general, as well as specifically on contests for graphic design. Here are my responses to the most popular arguments against crowdsourced contests.
Argument: “The designer in essence works free of charge and with an often falsely advertised, overinflated promise for future employment; or is given other insufficient forms of compensation.” – No-Spec.com
Response: The designer is free to compete or not compete in crowdsourcing. If you decide to develop logos, or business names, or any project that has to be chosen by the client before you get paid, well, you’re taking a risk. Why is this an issue? It won’t take long for a designer to realize if they are able to justify working on these projects. If they can’t justify the time spent they will quit competing in the contests. If the product doesn’t prove to be profitable for the designer he’ll stop using it. Why do we need to protect people from deciding this for themselves?
Argument: “Through contests designers cannot do a proper marketing research required by the project, therefore they cannot create the right thing for the client, who then chooses on the basis of ‘the prettiest design’.” – No-Spec.com
Response: This is a blanket statement that assumes a lot. The reality is that not every business needs the same level of research and preparation prior to developing a logo, which is the project that this statement is about. If I own a lawn care business I don’t really need you to research my competitors before creating a logo that I can use on my business cards, worker t-shirts, and on our trucks. This isn’t brain surgery, period. Crowdsourcing appeals to a specific type of client, and that client is not, for example, and international beverage company. The clients that do not need intense market research are perfect for crowdsourced designs, or crowdsourced anything.
Argument: “..disreputable practice in and of itself. You impede the designer from earning a proper salary.” – No-Spec.com
Response: Crowdsourcing is absolutely disruptive. It disrupts everything that we’ve done for hundreds of years in the service industries. Not just design, but every service industry. It brings more competition and lowers costs for all clients across all levels. Crowdsourcing of design work can decrease the maximum salaries in the graphic design industry, yes, but that’s what free trade and supply and demand are all about. “If supply increases and demand remains unchanged, then it leads to lower equilibrium price and higher quantity.” – Wikipedia. Lower prices for the consumer mean lower salaries for designers. This is not a problem, this is just a reality. Designers now have to create either higher quality work or provide a higher quality of customer support in order to compete with the cheaper options. Competition is good for the consumer. This is no secret. This is not something to avoid.
Argument: “Creatives who fall into this unproductive cycle eventually crank out massive strings of poorly conceived, ineffectively executed and in a growing number of cases, plagiarized work from other professionals in order to win as many posted ‘contest bids’ as possible.” – No-Spec.com
Response: Lower quality work is a completely acceptable product of crowdsourcing. Clients are getting an “inferior” product for a superior price. Often crowdsourcing is performed by less-experienced workers, or those trying to get their feet wet in an industry. Minor League sports leagues offer an inferior product for either superior prices or to markets that do not have a Major League option. Crowdsourcing is no different. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a market of clients with lesser needs being serviced by providers with lesser skills. To go back to the lawn care company scenario, most of the owners of small businesses would argue that they simply do not need the same logo design product that a national restaurant chain needs. Clients are now able to purchase what they need for a price they feel is fair. They can decide what level of service they need.
Argument: “The more they crank out, the more they earn. What they DON’T realize, or fail to understand is that those who run these deplorable mills pay designers a comparable pittance to what they themselves earn in their markup, making a very substantial profit in the process.” – No-Spec.com
Response: This is quite possibly one of the most shallow arguments against crowdsourcing contests I’ve seen. Supply and demand will also dictate whether or not the crowd continues to perform in crowdsourcing contests. Creatives only need to be paid enough for them to keep competing in the contests. Somewhere there is a perfect formula of compensation to success percentage ratio that will keep the maximum number of crowd workers competing on contests on a given website. If a company can discover that formula that is smart business. Smart business is not bad and should not be avoided or punished. Apple is charging just about the maximum that people will pay for an iPhone. This is smart business. We do not fault them for figuring out how bad we all want their product. The amount of money a crowd company takes as a fee has absolutely not part of the equation of whether the workers are “properly” compensated. Each person will require a different amount of compensation to continue to work on contests. Just because a website offers too little for you to continue competing on its contests does not mean that website is under-compensating the rest of the workers. If crowdsourcing underpays, then people will stop doing it and it will disappear. Why is this even an argument against crowdsourcing? If you hate crowdsourcing contests than you should be excited that you think it’s under-compensating designers.
Argument: “However, when you’re communicating with hundreds of people, all of whom are competing for a single payment, the barrier between request and action becomes much wider and projects quickly fall behind. From a simple productivity standpoint, crowdsourcing pales next to a dedicated design team.” – Sprye Studios
Response: This statement is only partially true and mostly not worth mentioning. If you have a project that is very intensive and will require much back-and-forth between the designer and the client, then crowdsourcing isn’t a good idea. Crowdsourcing is great for projects that can be described easily and understood by many across different backgrounds, education, and experience levels. This is why most crowdsourcing websites are for simpler things like logo creative or business naming. If you’re creating a complex catalog, interactive CD, product commercial, etc, crowdsourcing the work won’t even seem appealing to most clients. The reality is that just about all of what is currently being crowdsourced are simple projects that can be easily described in a few paragraphs. This argument doesn’t even need to be made.
Argument: “When a design gets crowdsourced, creativity dies. No matter how loose the specifications are and how accommodating the job provider is, the first few designs almost always end up dominating the creative output for the entire competition. Once designers are exposed to those first few samples, creativity suffers and everything ends up looking the same. While great for consistency, crowdsourcing kills the creativity that fuels great design.” – Sprye Studios. “The gallery has already killed my creativity. And I know I’d make mistakes in my design for Medical Careers Online, because I’ve already made subconscious assumptions about what they want in a logo.” – Karl Fundenberger
Response: The only way this statement can be true is if the speaker is himself not very creative. If you cannot find a way to come up with a creative logo after catching a glimpse of a few logos you might be in the wrong profession. I’ve seen hundreds of logos in my life, all that I can recall in memory. Nike, Chili’s, Coca-Cola, BMW…does having seen these logos somehow prevent me from creating something creative for Mom’n'Pop Shop? Absolutely not. If a designer cannot refocus and look at a few refreshing logo designs via the Internet or a logo design book, in order to get past what they saw in a logo contest, they are not worth much as a designer. I would not hire someone who admitted that they are not creative enough to overcome this obstacle. This argument is just absurd.
Argument: “Every 100 competitions, crowdsourcing may turn out a true design gem. The problem is that 1/100 aren’t good odds for most businesses.” – Sprye Studios
Response: Crowdsourcing creates a lower price point service of a lesser quality than a traditional firm would offer. This is not bad, this is choice. This provides clients with options. Every client must view examples of the work a crowdsourcing website develops before deciding if they want to proceed with a contest. Expecting 100% comparable results to hiring a full-fledged design studio is the only real problem. “Buying a cheap car means your car will be paid less when you go to resell.” This is obviously a ridiculous statement, but it reveals that nature of this argument. A cheaper product is most often inferior. We’ve all learned to balance this as we’ve become consumers in life.
I personally do not know how graphic design crowdsourcing websites find enough designers willing to spend hours to compete in a logo contest. But, this does not mean that they concept is evil. I’m not sure that this type of product can sustain over the next 5-10 years as it seems to me that it requires a constant stream of new designers thinking that most of their submissions will win. Other crowdsourcing concepts like crowd labor (MemberMob, mechanical turk, etc) do not have this problem as they compensate for micro-tasks. My website, Naming Force, is a creative crowdsourcing contest website, but the amount of time it takes to compete in a naming contest is miniscule compared to the time it takes to design a logo. You can be competitive in Naming Force contests with only 5-10 minutes of time spent on each project. Another of my websites, MemberMob, crowdsources labor the rare resource of human website registrants. In order to compete on MemberMob you simply need to be one of the rare resources of being a human and also be willing to register on a website and promote it via your Facebook account. This takes only minutes for each “contest.” Crowdsourcers on MemberMob are also reward with access to up-and-coming websites that haven’t been opened to the public yet. Again, I’m not in the graphic design crowdsourcing contests space, but I just think the arguments against it are unfounded. The market will determine whether or not this service works for both clients and creatives. Only time will tell if it is sustainable.
Business, Development No Comments
Business No Comments Roughly ten years ago I proposed this question to my fellow co-workers: “Which programmer would be a more valuable resource? One who has never made a mistake, or one who has made many mistakes?”
It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, imagine an impossibly perfect craftsman and then one who has made mistakes. Is it at all possible for the mistake-free worker to be as “experienced” as the failure-ridden worker? My belief is that the “perfect” worker wouldn’t have the same depth of knowledge as the worker that has experienced failures. Using this logic that would make the worker with failures more valuable than the perfect worker. Is there value in each failure? Does each failure you have make you more valuable?
It’s through failure that you tend to learn the most about what you do. If everything always works, always goes right, you never learn the intricacies of your skill or expertise. With instant success you incorrectly simply believe that whatever method you have employed is the right method without understanding why another method wouldn’t have worked. Without understanding what DOESN’T work you cannot truly understand what DOES work. In order to increase your value from failure you must learn from the failure. Learning from failing is the only way that failing is an improvement. The success after failure is always greater in value than initial success. Entrepreur Shervin Pishevar, who you’ll learn more about later, says “If you don’t fail, you haven’t tried hard enough.” Are you trying hard enough to fail?
People who have never failed are the worst people to get advice from. Don’t ask a one-hit-wonder to be your mentor. How would someone who had instant success know that the answers they are giving to your questions are truly valid? Without being able to compare success to failure how do you know that their success came from anything more than luck? Those who have both failed and succeeded have best advice to give. Find mentors who have failed and succeeded for a well-rounded mentorship.
I recently discovered a few web articles about failure and would like to include some of them in this post. In this article Paul Sawers says, “Failure is a key facet to the entrepreneurial process.” He writes of many start-ups that failed in one way and eventually succeeded in another. He refers to these a “pivots”. A pivot is a failure that is redirected into success. Many people will be surprised to hear that YouTube is one of these pivots. The “brilliant” idea behind YouTube was to host people’s online dating profile videos. Genius! No, failure! YouTube absolutely failed in doing this, but succeeded in other ways; mostly in serving silly cat videos. The founders of YouTube have learned from their early failure. They’ve gone on to create the worlds largest video hosting website and have proceeded to become investors and advisers in other web start-ups. Their advice and experiences are worth a lot to others trying to follow in their footsteps.
To get over failure you must make an exit strategy from it. Find a solution or find a distraction. Some failures have fixes. Other failures have solutions that you will never find. Don’t get hung up on this. These failures must be left behind. If you are going to stick with your project, identify the mistake that caused the failure or else you will not be able to move past it. Identify the failure and make a pact to make a better decision, or execution, the next time. At the very least identify where you went wrong; be honest with yourself. Winston Churchill said, “Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” I believe that this quality, a lack of loss if enthusiasm based on results, is found in many entrepreneurs.
Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” This mentality is what makes failure an asset. Each failure means that you have learned something that doesn’t work. Through a process of elimination you should be able to discover the method that works. In many cases you’re simply trying to discover a more effective method. Your failures should lead you to finding successful paths.
In his article about hiring people who admit failure, Jeff Stibel says, “When you make a mistake, you’re forced to look back and find out exactly where you went wrong, and formulate a new plan for your next attempt. By contrast, when you succeed, you don’t always know exactly what you did right that made you successful (often, it’s luck).” Most often, out-of-the-gate success means you don’t fully understand why you’re successful, even if you think you do. Making all of the right decisions on the first attempt means not understanding how changing the variables would affect your level of success. Those who have failed truly understand the effects of the variables.
I believe that Netflix is a good example of this. Netflix experienced instant success with their direct-to-home DVD rental service. Netflix experienced instant success and constant growth for more than a decade before hitting a bump in the road. Netflix assumed that they had everything figured out only to be surprised by customers in 2011. When Netflix decided to split their DVD rental and (fairly new) online streaming businesses into two companies, while surprising customers with new fees at the same time, customers reacted in ways that have never been seen in the Internet age. Netflix was forced to backtrack on their decision. This is probably the first time that an Internet backlash has stopped a company from starting a new business venture/spin-off. Netflix is forced now to learn from their mistake and decide how to move on. Their next subscription and DVD rental pricing structure will surely be designed from what they learned from this backlash. But it’s from this mistake that Netflix is learning what was right about their initial product offering. They are learning what they did right about pricing DVD rentals with streaming “thrown in” for a small additional fee. Whether this business model can sustain the company is another issue, but they’re at least now learning what customers will pay for their services. It’s only though this failure that they now understand their success.
In a recent interview of Sean Parker (co-founder of Napster) and Shervin Pishevar (WebOS and Freewebs) the two were asked by an audience member about each of their biggest failures and what they learned from them. At this point in the interview video Sean discusses where they went wrong with Napster and Shervin talks about a more personal failure, his first marriage, as well as touching on the failure of WebOS. Both of them feel that failures are essential to success and growing both as an entrepreneur and as a person. Sean discusses the failure of hiring the wrong people to take Napster to the next level. Hiring the wrong people meant, to him, that they never made a valid business model out of the concept of music file sharing. Sean says they hired the wrong, “experienced”, CEO to move them forward. Possibly this CEO had too many instant successes and not enough failures? Shervin talks about failing to realize that creating a business that was “10 years” ahead of its time (WebOS) wasn’t a profitable business model. In this failure he learned to build businesses that are 2-3 years into the future, concept and technology-wise, and has started multiple successful businesses since then.
Try hard enough that you fail. Fail hard enough that you learn. Learn enough that you succeed.
Development No Comments When designing a new website be sure that the website logo is easily reusable by others. In today’s social web you want to be sure that bloggers and web writers can use your logo in their posts and articles. Don’t make it complicated for a producer to include your logo with a story. This tip also affects how your website is represented on sites that automatically scrape content for preview images, like Facebook. Don’t make your logo part of an HTML background image. If your logo is set over a colored background make sure the logo is a PNG file with a transparent background. If you do not do this at least make sure the area around the logo is a constant solid color that won’t look weird used to accompany an article. Another thing to consider is that the proportions of the logo file allow the logo to be used by itself. Make sure that when the logo is cut for the HTML that it has an even amount of negative space around the logo. You don’t want 20 pixels of blue background on the left of the logo and 120 pixels of blue background on the right side of the logo.
Development No Comments If you don’t already know, Facebook has opened up their data for some, regulated, 3rd party use. Facebook calls this their Open Graph API (application programming interface). Any developer who follows the specified steps can create applications that integrate with Facebook user data. Facebook does apply limitations on how developers can use the data in order to protect Facebook users. But, for the most part, if a Facebook user agrees, you can gain access to just about all of their profile data, and even post to their wall, etc.
Before you can start developing with Facebook you’ll need to register an application (yet to be developed) with Facebook. Start on the Facebook Developers page and then go to the Apps tab. I’m not going to go into detail about this because it’s pretty straight forward and already written about everywhere on the web. To make getting to the data easier there is a PHP SDK for Facebook Open Graph. We will be using this library for all of our Facebook queries.
Before you can get to any data a user is going to first have to grant your application access to specific parts of their data. Facebook has different data and actions sectioned into permission groups. Below is an example of requesting permissions to get a user’s email address, bio data (name, etc), and to be able to read their wall.
$config = array(
‘appId’ => FBAPPID,
‘secret’ => FBAPPSECRET,
);
$facebook = new Facebook($config);
$fbuserid = $facebook->getUser();
$params = array(
“scope” => “read_stream,email,user_about_me”,
“redirect_uri” => “http://www.wescutshall.com/”
);
$loginurl = $facebook->getLoginUrl($params);
This will result in a variable, $loginurl, that you can use to create a hyperlink that points to Facebook and prompts the user to accept or deny the request for the specific permissions for your app. Assuming the user clicks “allow”, the user will be directed back to your website and you will now magically be able to query the information via the SDK. This $loginurl could replace your website’s “sign in” link if you wanted to simply force every user to have a Facebook account (and accept your app’s permissions). If a user has already given your application access to the data requested in the $loginurl url, Facebook will simply send the user to the redirect_uri, which should be your user dashboard/profile page. Some data, such as a user’s stream, is explicitly shown on a seperate permissions step on Facebook during the access granting process. A user will first allow you access to their bio data, and then they will allow or deny access to their stream. Should a user only allow access to their bio, and not their stream, the user will be bounced back to this permissions screen anytime your application attempts to access stream data. This actually integrates really nicely with web apps and keeps you from having to do constant error checking on data you’re asking for from Facebook.
Below is an example of requesting the bio information:
//unique identifier on Facebook
$fbuserid = $facebook->getUser();
$user_profile = $facebook->api(‘/me’,'GET’);
$fname = $user_profile["first_name"];
$lname = $user_profile["last_name"];
$email = $user_profile["email"]; //this was a separate permission, remember?
Requesting wall/stream information:
$feed = $facebook->api(‘/me/feed’,'GET’);
for ($i=0;$i<count($feed["data"]);$i++)
{
// do something, like reading all shared links – $feed["data"][$i]["link"]
}
You could also check to see if a user has already liked your Facebook page:
$url = “/me/likes/$pageid”;
$like = $facebook->api($url,’GET’);
if($like["data"][0]["id"] != $pageid)
{
//do something, like suggest they like your page, or hide content until they do
}
This is just an intro into getting data from Facebook from PHP using the Open Graph API and Facebook PHP SDK. Facebook dogs and Google should be able to answer most of your questions.